McLuhan was as prescient as Postel
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He says that everything is programming. That you have TV itself and you have shows. People may have thought I Love Lucy or Johnny Carson were bigger than a TV show, but in the end they weren't. Are the companies Fred helps get started really companies, or are they really shows? To which I said -- they're rock bands.
 Sometimes things that are TV shows have features which are sucked down into the medium. It's how there's a continuity between the TV of Lucy and the TV of Linsanity (which is thoroughly captivating TV, even though Lin himself has been sidelined). The platform is shifting and adopting features from its programming.
Podcasting, RSS, blogging, YouTube, I would argue Angry Birds and Twitter -- all become part of what the Internet is, but they started out as programming. Before that Compuserve, MCI Mail, AOL. AppleLink. Craig's List. MySpace. And on and on. Each came out as a program, then became part of the platform.
 Look at how magazines as a platform have changed. It used to be a gatekeeper model. Now lists like Time's 100 most influential are revealing because they have become jokes, anachronisms. Why did we care who influenced the editors of Time? Becuase that was the only path to fame. Now there are so many other paths to fame. |
Fred Wilson really 
